by Cramer, John
“Some of this stuff is grounds for arrest on charges of counterfeiting or fraud,” said George. “The money looks like high quality counterfeiting that somehow got the dates wrong. And the credit cards are just as bad.”
“The question,” said Roger, “is what to keep.”
George returned the knife and cutting laser to his pocket, put his watch back on, and looked at his driver’s license. “I think I’ll keep this.” he said.
“OK,” Roger shrugged, “ and I must keep my lapstation, too. It’s not a crime to possess a computer that nobody is making yet, even if it’s the most powerful computer presently on the planet.” He used his hand to dig a hole in the beach sand. He placed the currency, key rings, postdated coins, credit cards, passport, green card, and a few other items into the depression. George added his SSC key card. Roger fanned the cutting laser over the objects. The blaze sparkled colorfully for a time, then quickly subsided to a pile of glowing slag. Roger kicked sand over the hole, feeling depressed. It seemed that he had systematically erased all of the important events of his life, leaving himself an empty vessel with no past and no future.
In silence they walked along the beach for a while. “We need funds,” said Roger finally. “That’s the key to everything else. Otherwise we’re beach bums. Perhaps we could use the laser to cut open a vending machine to get some money. Or perhaps get currency from an automatic teller machine.”
“We’re not that desperate,” said George. “At least, not yet. Besides, we’d do unnecessary damage and probably trigger an automatic alarm that would end us up in jail. With no way of identifying ourselves or explaining our existence here, we might just stay in jail permanently.”
Roger nodded. “We have the ability to WRITE,” he said. “Perhaps we could Write a plant that grows duplicates of hundred dollar bills instead of leaves.”
“That’s also a crime,” said George, “and when the fake money was noticed by federal agents it would attract a lot of unwanted attention. They‘d probably track us down. We need to make something that isn’t illegal and that has intrinsic value in itself. Perhaps we could WRITE a device that would duplicate objects of value, maybe computer chips.” He looked at a jellyfish washed up on the beach. “Or maybe I could modify some filter-feeding organism like a jellyfish so that it extracts gold from sea water for us.”
Roger considered this. “I’m afraid there isn’t that much gold in sea water. Even if the organism had a large surface area, a perfect extraction procedure, and a high flow rate, it would take months or years to accumulate a quantity of gold that had any significant value.
“But you’ve given me an idea, George.” He walked down the sand to the remains of a beach bonfire and picked up a lump of charcoal. “It wouldn’t be difficult,” he said, “to Write a nanomachine that reorganizes carbon atoms into a face-centered cubic crystal lattice structure.”
“Carbon crystal structure?” George asked, “You mean graphite?”
“No,” said Roger, “I mean diamonds.”
At 8:15 the following morning, Roger entered the EZ Pawn pawnshop at the corner of Rosenberg and Broadway. He and George had walked for miles along the seawall as the sun was coming up, watching the antique trolleys pass but lacking the carfare to ride them. Finally the trolley tracks turned away from the beach, and they followed them to the intersection that Roger remembered, marked by a tall monument to the Texas Revolution done in florid Victorian style and the long blue awning of a pawnshop.
Roger was tired, hungry, damp, needed a shave, and itched in many places from salt on his skin. “Good morning, sir,” he said brightly to the blue-jacketed man behind the glass display counter.
The man nodded at Roger and smiled. “Howdy,” he said. “What can I do for you, friend?”
He looks like Clint Eastwood, Roger thought, noting the thin carefully trimmed sideburns. I wonder if he cultivates the resemblance. Roger placed a square of white cloth on the glass surface of the counter and opened it. On the cloth lay five round-cornered translucent octahedrons. They were uncut diamonds, one to two carats in weight, that a few hours before had grown in the moonlight from beach charcoal as George and Roger watched. Roger produce a shard of broken mirror from his pocket, showed it to the Clint person, and scratched the mirror surface with the corner of one of the stones to demonstrate its hardness. “I would like to pawn these top-quality uncut diamonds ,” Roger explained. “My late father was a diamond merchant in England. He had a good business in King’s Lynn. When Dad died, he left me these stones. I’ve carried them with me for years in memory of him. But now, unfortunately, I’m in serious need of funds.”
“Real sorry to hear that, friend,” Clint said, grinning. “What‘s the problem?”
“I’m afraid I had a bit of a row with my girlfriend last night,” said Roger. “When I woke up this morning, everything I had was gone. Money, wallet, watch, credit cards, car, everything. She even threw my clothes into the Gulf, but I found them washed up on the beach. Fortunately, she missed these. I suppose she didn’t know what they were. I wonder if you could loan me a spot of cash for them?”
“Well now,” said Clint, removing a jeweler’s loupe from a drawer behind the counter, “let’s just have a look at these beauties.”
Roger was pleased and surprised to learn how easy it had been to slip into the role he’d been playing. He must have a talent for acting, he decided. Roger emerged from the pawnshop with $1,200 in cash plus a brown suede jacket that fit him nicely, two Stetson hats, and two used suitcases that he had persuaded Clint, after some bargaining, to include in the deal. George had estimated that the market value of the diamonds was closer to $6,000, but the $1,200 looked very good, particularly considering that there was no documentation for the stones and that the merchandise had until recently been lumps of charcoal from a driftwood beach fire.
They walked back toward the seawall. Along the way they had a nice breakfast, and Roger began to feel optimistic. At a discount store they bought some new clothes, underwear, and toilet articles. They emerged carrying suitcases of a more substantial weight. Roger’s suitcase also now contained a bag of charcoal.
They turned East at Seawall Boulevard and walked two blocks to the historic Galvez Hotel. When George couldn’t produce a credit card, desk clerk was apologetic but firm in requiring him to pay for the room for two days in advance. The bellboy took them and their suitcases to the 8th floor in an ornate elevator and showed them into a spacious room with charming period furniture, modern plumbing, and a sweeping view of the Gulf.
Roger, freshly showered, put on his starched newly-purchased pajamas, pulled the curtains to darken the room, and collapsed on the bed. “I’m dead tired,” he said after a few minutes, “but my body-clock is disoriented from the time shift, and I don’t feel sleepy. I should have bought some melatonin at a drugstore.”
George, clad in a bath towel and lying on the other bed, said, “Not likely, Roger. This is 1987. As I recall, melatonin wasn’t available, with or without a prescription, until about 1995.”
“Really?” said Roger. “What did people do about jet-lag before that?”
“They suffered,” said George. “But you don’t need to. Just Write yourself a clock adjustment protein.”
Roger put his palm to his forehead. “Of course!” he said. “I must be even more tired than I feel.” He put his fingertips to his arm and closed his eyes.
He slept fitfully for most of the afternoon. His dreams were populated by large flying insects that chased him as he dragged his legs through viscous water and that ate diamonds as fast as he could produce them. But when he awoke about 6 PM, he felt wonderfully relaxed.
George suggested a seafood dinner on the Galveston waterfront. They crossed the broad boulevard to the sidewalk along the seawall and strolled past several ancient tourist-shop piers until they reached the Flagship, a hotel and res
taurant built on a long pier extending from the sea wall into the waters of the Gulf.
A waiter who identified himself as “Bob” conducted them to a table with a fine Gulf view and proceeded to recite a list of the day’s specials. Roger ordered the crab-stuffed flounder. George selected the blackened redfish and a bottle of dry oaky Washington State pinot chardonnay with which he was well acquainted.
Roger turned the two carat diamond on the table before them, admiring its basic octahedral shape. “The diamond business isn’t bad,” he said, chewing slowly, “but it won’t last. I recall that at around the turn of the millennium, a new industrial vapor deposition process will become available for growing large diamonds in a variety of shapes, making all sorts of useful things with them, and selling them very cheaply.”
George nodded. “But for now it’s a good basic source of income to get us started. We have to be careful, though. Natural diamonds always have a few flaws and impurities. If ours are too perfect, it will give away the fact that they didn’t actually come from a diamond mine.”
“I’ve already thought of that,” said Roger. “The nano-assemblers I WROTE last night were programmed to include plausible impurities at the part per million level and also to put a few random flaws into the crystal structure. I’d need to do a bit of library research to get an optimum match to natural diamonds, but these should pass a cursory inspection. As I see it, our real problem will be to find a believable story for our source of diamonds. My dear late lamented old Dad, the diamond merchant of King’s Lynn, can only have left me so many of the things. And I might be had up for evasion of death duties by the UK revenue authorities or for smuggling by US Customs if I’m not careful.”
“Yes, we do need a plausible source,” said George. “We should buy a defunct diamond mine. Probably somewhere in Africa or South America. We can WRITE nanomachines that will seed it with a new supply of diamonds. Then we mine out the first batch and then sell the producing mine to someone in the business. That basic scheme can be used over and over. If anyone notices our string of successes, it can be attributed to our superior knowledge of diamond geology and to our ability to spot old mines with untapped veins.”
“That’s tidy,” said Roger. “There should be other applications of that basic strategy also. But our other immediate problem is personal documents. We can’t simply get new identification. There are individuals here already who look just like us, only younger, and whose names are George Griffin and Roger Coulton. We somehow have to establish new identities. And there’s also a problem with transportation. Even with our new access to cash, we can’t even rent a car. We don’t have the proper credit cards and driver’s licenses.”
“I’ve been giving that problem some thought,” said George. “I conclude that we will each need to establish several new identities, not just one. And in this country, fortunately, that isn’t too difficult. The first step is to get a birth certificate.”
“That will be a problem,” said Roger. “Could one be forged?”
“It isn’t necessary,” said George, “I can obtain a real one by picking an approximate birth date, going to a big city newspaper office, looking up the obituary notices in the microfilm archives, and finding a male baby that died when it was a few months old. Then I go to the City Records Office and ask for a birth certificate in the name of the deceased child.”
“But,” Roger objected, “won’t the records show that the child is dead?”
“No,” said George. “In this country there’s no effort to correlate birth and death records. People move around too much to make that practical, and there’s also a deeply ingrained popular view that too much detailed government record-keeping is an attack on personal freedom. It should be easy.”
Roger stroked his chin. Suddenly he pictured Susan standing before Elvis’ cage, and wondered if he would see her again. Then he sighed. She’s only about twelve years old now, he realized.
“Then I go to the Social Security Office,” said George, “and ask for a new Social Security number in the name of my new alter ego, saying that I’ve been living abroad for many years and had never needed one before. The Social Security people always maintain that a Social Security number is not for purposes of identification, even though it’s widely used that way, so they give them out fairly freely. With my new Social Security number I can open a bank account in my new name and put, say, $40,000 into it. I can get credit cards from my bank with no problems because of my big bank balance. Then I buy a car, paying cash, and take a driver’s license test, which provides me with a picture ID driver’s license. Then I go to the Federal Building and get a U.S. Passport, using my birth certificate and drivers license as identification.
“And, presto! I’m a real person. If I do that several times, I can be several real people at the same time.”
“Interesting,” said Roger. “I have a slightly more difficult problem. I will need to do something similar in the UK, but I’ll need some kind of valid passport even to get there. Perhaps I’ll have to work on my speech patterns and learn to speak like an American, before I can get a US passport and venture abroad.”
“Maybe that won’t be necessary,” said George. “With Writing, we have some control of our facial characteristics. You could make yourself look like me and use one of my passports to enter the UK. Or better yet, we could use nanomachines to produce a duplicate of my passport with your picture on it.”
“But what happens if we’re caught?” said Roger. “Surely there are several illegal steps in the process you described.”
George smiled at him. “Are you the same person who wanted to use a cutting laser to rob an automatic teller machine this morning? The passport operation is clearly illegal, as is getting the birth certificate and Social Security number. The story I recommend, if one of us is caught, is to claim to be a victim of amnesia. You woke up one morning with money but no identification at all, and you don’t know who you are. You’re only doing your best to establish a new identity by the one means open to you, so you can become a productive and functioning member of society.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Roger, “that’s almost true.”
The following day George and Roger rode a Greyhound Bus to Houston. Roger was able to make diamond sales at several jewelry dealers in the downtown Houston area. The resulting stake was $13,487.
They rented two separate rooms in the downtown Marriott, each paying cash for a week in advance when they registered. The next morning they took a taxi to the archive center of the Houston Chronicle to do file research that would be necessary to begin their new lives.
CHAPTER 7.2
Conventional Wisdom
IN LATE 1987 the financial pages of the Houston Chronicle had noted the rise to prominence of one George Preston and his new company, Petroleum Genetics Laboratories or PGL for short. Preston was a mysterious figure. He had appeared on the Houston oil scene out of nowhere. Even after considerable effort the Chronicle financial reporter had been unable to learn anything about his background, credit history, previous experience, education, or source of financial backing. The local banks had records of substantial PGL deposits but no loans.
Petroleum Genetics Laboratories had started by using recombinant DNA techniques to “engineer” a species of rapidly multiplying but generation-limited petroleum-eating bacteria that was proving very useful in erasing the effects of oil spills. Several small Gulf Coast spills in 1987 had demonstrated the value of PGL’s oil-eating bacteria and placed the company’s profits on a steeply rising trajectory.
Preston had used these profits to buy up “worthless” oil leases in the long-dead oil fields of East Texas, leases for wells from which all the recoverable oil had been removed decades earlier. This has been treated as a joke at first, and in late 1987 many holders of ancient East Texas leases had rushed to sell them to this “crazy Yankee” before his mone
y ran out, he came to his senses, or he was institutionalized.
Then in December of 1987 an unexpected thing happened. PGL’s dried-up East Texas wells in the area between Gladewater and Tyler began to produce oil. Their yield curves rose, week by week, until by Christmas they equaled peak production during the golden days of Spindletop and the great Texas oil boom. In early January speculators began to buy up the dead wells nearby, but they soon found that the PGL bonanza did not extend to them. Disappointed, they sold their leases to Preston cheap to cut their losses. PGL’s profits from the producing wells fueled further acquisitions. Suddenly, the major oil producers came to the realization that there was a significant new player in their business.
Several of the big oil companies had already initiated well-funded research and industrial espionage programs aimed at discovering PGL’s secret, when Preston revealed it to the news media at an April 1988 press conference in Houston. He announced that the privately held Petroleum Genetics Laboratories would henceforth become PetroGen, Inc., a public corporation whose stock would be listed on the New York Stock Exchange after an initial stock offering of 20 million shares at about $50 per share.
PetroGen, in addition to its now-vast oil holdings in Texas, Oklahoma, Venezuela, and elsewhere, and its exponentially rising revenues, had filed unique patent applications describing a genetically engineered family of bacteria that could free valuable petroleum from its bonds in porous layers of rock, sand, and shale, while at the same time trimming sluggish long-chain hydrocarbon molecules to the more marketable octane and septane sizes. As a proof-of-principle, these slimmed down, pre-refined petroleum products were already flowing freely at the PetroGen well heads. In less than a year a new blue-chip stock had been created on Wall Street.